Semantic Pen - A Personal Information Management System for Pen Based Devices (Extended Abstract) Akila Varadarajan, Nilesh Patel and William Grosky The University of Michigan - Dearborn, Dept. of Computer Science, 4901, Evergreen Road, Dearborn, MI 48080, USA {akilav, patelnv, wgrosky }@umich.edu Abstract. The Onset of Semantic Web technology have promised a new vision of Personal Information Management (PIM). With the advent of Pen-based computing, PIM faces new challenges: usability and flexibility are important constraints in the pen based environment. We present our system of Semantic Pen - an augmented pen based PIM system that merges the efficiency of semantic web with the usability of pen based devices. The architecture consists of an intuitive user interface which can capture digital ink, a Hidden Markov model (HMM) to extract personal information and a data model of Resource Description Framework(RDF) for flexible organization and semantic querying of data. 1 Introduction Personal Information Managers (PIM) have become increasingly common these days. The usage model of PIM systems have gone beyond scheduling reminders and simple record maintenance. Semantic Web, through the introduction of on- tological reasoning by means of Resource Description Framework(RDF)[1] have proven to be an efficient solution for PIM . The Haystack Project [2] is well known for applying semantic web technologies to create a fully flexible and customiz- able PIM portal for organizing the germane information. The Gnowsis Semantic desktop [3] targets data integration including data from 3rd party applications. Semex[4] focuses on personalized desktop search. Chandler[5] is an Interpersonal Information Manager that supports data sharing besides managing email, calen- dar and other general information. Retsina Calendar Agent[6], is a distributed meeting scheduling agent which works in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Semantic Web. While most of the research in PIM using Semantic Web is centered around desktop and notebooks, there is a need to extend such concepts in context of pen- based computing. The pen-based systems have empowered users by providing the most natural form of input modality known as Digital Ink. Since its introduction, researchers have shown increased interest to ease the user interface centric tasks. Wilcox et al. designed a system Dynomite [7] for organizing telephone numbers and other tasks by applying properties for ink words. Scribbler [8] is another tool